A Garden of Words

Do you remember the first time you felt a flash of sunrise in your heart, as you talked to someone about poetry? What did it feel like? How did the conversation turn either your fears on their heads or your excitement into more colors? What does poetry do for you? More importantly, what does it do for others? I think I’ve been searching for a way for others to not only understand my words, but also connect with them. In connecting with my poems, maybe they’d connect to themselves—with words they never felt they could say out loud— and with feelings they maybe felt were too much in their mouth. Then maybe we could all live understood by others.

I remember being a pre-teen and wanting so badly to write things that resonated with not just me but others. What was the bridge that connected me to others? What medium could I use to express how I felt and how could I learn about other people’s experiences as well? I started out reading voraciously, as a very shy and introverted Black kid adopted into a white family. Like a lot of writers I know—past and present—the library was the place for me to lay out my words and emotions between the pages of a good book (or multiple books if we’re being honest). I remember reading all kinds of authors and genres and being enamored with the written word. How did all these people come to write about their own experiences in ways that found me, a transracially adopted child of the Midwest? How did their poetry plant gardens in a way that made other people want to write? That made other people stop and appreciate the art form? What magic did they possess that allowed them to write in such a way that wielded tenderness and tenacity? How did they decide what to write and in what form? How did they manage to grow their poetry next to their neighbors? And how did they start communities that made room for their own growth and for the growth of others?

I remember beginning to write poetry and not having a clue as to how I was going to find people to talk about it with—to talk about the expansiveness and soul-goodness a brilliant piece of writing can impart to an audience, or even to oneself. I remember thinking that if all these long-dead poets who didn’t look like me, didn’t talk like me, and didn’t have the same experiences I had still managed to become “classics” or at least widely read in the country, then surely there is space for me to take up and invite other people in. My first book of poems was Maya Angelou’s slim collection I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and I still have it in my parents’ house. That book changed my life. I recall that I could write whatever I wanted to, however I wanted to, for myself, and it was poetry. I remember thinking that although Maya Angelou wasn’t writing for me specifically, I felt I was a part of her community and I wanted to have that effect on others—I wanted to bring others into my experiences and feelings, as much I wanted to write about them for myself. I also saw parts of myself in her writing—parts of myself that I thought no one else had or ever wondered about.

Poetry, for me, has been cathartic as much as it’s been a tempest where I am found and challenged by it, by my own presuppositions and by the care that others receiving my poems offer. I have always wanted to write with a purpose and not just because it was trendy or just because I could. For marginalized people, no matter where or who they are, poetry can offer a place, or places, to rest and engage in a potentially revolutionary art form that affirms and affects the soul. I also think—without sounding too pretentious—that poetry affirms and affects the way we interact both physically and emotionally with others. When I think of visceral poetry—of work that moves the bodymind—I think of those in my community alongside poets like Patricia Smith and Arisa White. I think of Ladi’s and Danielle’s poems, I think of Charity’s poems. When I read their poems, their words simultaneously pull on a thread of recollection in our shared expressions, but they also open up different avenues into which I feel free to wander in—and sit before the knowledge each of them has given to the page, to the reader, and to the audience. And like my good friend said, “poetry doesn’t and won’t necessarily change the world,” but I wholeheartedly believe that it changes the person writing it. This is what I mean when I say that the possibilities in poetry are a reason why I keep writing.

The page allows me to take a breath, to breathe, to find myself again—either quietly, or fiercely, in vulnerability, or an outright rage. I find echoes of who I’ve been when I am sitting before the page, and I am reminded that there is still room for me to write into who I am and who I want to become. Writing for me is a letting-go and claiming—claiming both the sun and the sorrows life brings, as well as a practice of holding a community of pain and joy from the people I’ve met, to the ones I am close to. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have the interiority of poetry, the worlds held and yet to be discovered inside the page. The rooms—both physical and emotional—I have found in poetry have been life-changing to enter. I have opened doors into being able to begin to process loss, joy, disappointment, microaggressions, racism, fear, friendship, love, family, and unexpected news. I have found more of who I am through poetry. I mean, reading Michelle Cliff’s Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise blossomed so many questions and answers in me after I finished it. I was so taken in by her use of the page and what it means to have a complicated lineage. How one’s gender and sexuality figure and factor into who we are, who we’re taught others want us to be, who we think we are, and who we continually find ourselves to change into if we are brave enough to explore it. And although I could only identify so far with her, I rediscovered a part of myself that I had been quietly letting exist in the background.

As someone with a complicated origin story and having to do a reckoning with who I have been because of other people’s perceptions, I found that reading Cliff’s poetry pointed me towards a truer self, and that she had always been an ancestor in some way. I think of the last lines of one of her poems that appear early in that book:

We are not exotic–or aromatic—or poignant.
We are not aberrations. We are ordinary.
—From “Passing”

As much as poetry has been a balm to me, it has also challenged me to step outside my comfort zone. Has the challenge been on the page? Yes, but it has also been just as important to have people around me—a community—embracing who I am while also seeing where I can go deeper in the poem, reveal more of who I am on the page and become a better, more healed, person. For the community I’ve found, who has found me, and has kept finding me, it’s not just about the act of writing or the discipline of revision—it’s also caring about who we are outside of the page. Because what we bring to the page, and how little or how much we allow to show, has much to do with how honest we’re willing to be. As much as I am introverted by personality, poetry and community have taught me to try and be open to trying new things. In different forms of poems—themes, techniques, traditions, cultures—I am grateful to have been introduced to more of myself and the “more” beyond myself through poetry, and by extension through my community.

By the “more” beyond myself, I mean I think of how poetry has expanded my ability to empathize, but also how it has widened my curiosity about others: what they have lived through and why they write. I have come to the page again and again, and every time it has been a different page, even when I walk away from a half-finished piece to decompress or meet other obligations. And that—that the page can tell me about itself and remake itself without my knowing and without permission, getting me to where I need to be? That is the beauty of poetry. It’s also why I love reading other people’s work. Because no matter if I have read a poem once, twice, or three times, it always comes back to me differently—it prompts me to think of different connections.

In the discipline of poetry there is a way to invite others into it that, if they take the offer, will give them courage to express their who and why, and what they want to keep becoming. The anticipation of hearing someone else’s journey through and with poetry is also why I love building community and why I think it’s so crucial to continually be open to hearing new voices. For me, I love community building in poetry because it also allows for such liminality when the audience is captivated by the poem and reader. There’s just an indescribable softness when a room goes quiet and everyone is waiting for richness to descend upon them. Whether that be in the form of a gentle ode or a fiery endeavor to restate that as a marginalized person you are HERE, poetry readings can be places of community in the midst of pain, laughter, surprise, and feelings of revolution.

I remember the first time I went to a Root Slam poetry reading at MLK Cafe in Oakland. I had never been in a room with such fire and gentleness—the way each reader read their poems carried the room into a kind of liminality—there was an intentionality behind the atmosphere. Similar to that experience, I attended a reading to hear a friend read their work at an event that specifically uplifted the Latinx community in the SF Bay Area. One of the things that I loved about that night, along with watching my friend, was there was no pretentiousness. There were no airs to put on and none to take out of the room—we all respected each reader and sat in anticipation of everyone’s work, regardless of their “status” in the local poetry scene. The people there—we were all connected by a love of the written word, by poetry—weren’t necessarily impressed by the accolades of some of the poets. As in, the awards didn’t make some of the poets’ work better or worse than those who had less or none at all. There we all were, there in that drafty room, surrounded by the song and sanctuary of the words. Enveloped by bodies listening to each reader sing and spirit each other into a new kind of home.

I wrote my way into community building in poetry as a way to find other narratives I don’t experience and to uplift them simply because they’re important. As I continued to read new-to-me poets and their work—whether a chapbook, full-length book, or at a local poetry reading (pre-covid)—on an otherwise quite unassuming and decidedly mundane Friday night, I began to want a community that was intentionally engaged in the world. I began to want the life on the page as well as the struggle for it. And I began to meet and connect with the kind of poets I thought were far and few in between. The poets writing themselves into community are those like Danielle Williams, Nabila Lovelace, Dior J. Stephens, Kevin Madrigal Galindo, Yeva Johnson, Danny Ryu, and Kyel Brooks.

It is important for me to be intentional, to be genuine, and to be purposeful in the way that I build community. I mean, personally speaking, why surround yourself with poets and writers who are known only for their prestige and not for their practice of community and “lifting as they climb,” in a way that brings up new poets? What would there be to talk about? Fame is nice—not that I’ve ever had it and definitely not that I’d ever want it—but I DO NOT want to be famous in that “hey aren’t you so-so poet” sort of way. I want to hold space for marginalized poets. I want people to be lit up by the expansiveness of poetry, of being present to take in someone else’s heart and creativity. But as I’ve met, and continue to meet more poets, I realize that so much of poetry is insular and unmoving and unmotivated for the ways it has gatekept marginalized poets, even as that kind of community “celebrated” (either in mockery or barely contained envy) Black poets who were infinitely more attuned to themselves, poetry, the page, and most importantly, their community, their people. And I understand why poetry—as beautiful and insular as it is—is seen as both mysterious and unattainable, out of touch and also intimidating.

Much of poetry taught in school—at least the de facto poets that I was introduced to when I was in K-12 in the Midwest—were long-dead men and women who looked nothing like me. So many poets didn’t really intrigue me into poetry like how reading Countee Cullen or Maya Angelou, or even Ntozake Shange, did and continue to do. How could I relate to poems from people who shared none of my worries? And why should they not have a chance to read their pain to the room and have their words returned gently back to them? Why shouldn’t they also know the joy of absolutely and unexpectedly connecting with a stranger—someone from the audience, or another poet who got up to read that night as well at the last second—and never wanting the night to end while you talk about poetry, about life?

There is something so beautifully spectacular about hearing someone whom you’ve never met and you feel understood by their work. Having that mindset and seeing what gardens come from it—that there is more than enough room for “up and coming” poets or just regular people who write poetry on the side, or after hours, or in the before hours—is why I really enjoy meeting other poets. I certainly do not believe that what poetry needs is more gatekeeping, be it in the form of ableism, or elitism, or classism. I think the divide between the “whys” of poetry and the realities we live in need to be completely dismantled and rethought. What is a poem that has no life behind it? No action, no love for others, no reckoning with the self over this art form you’ve chosen? We need more honesty about how we think the prevalence of poetry means the possession of it. It doesn’t. I am so much more interested in what lives on and beyond the page. Who are you to yourself and to the people around you? Who are you to the people who don’t know you? I am interested in the beyond, in the margins. That is to say, I am invested in the common and in the complicated. I am invested in the nuance and there is room enough for a multitude of narratives. As poets, we are just people, but we are also not just creators and makers. We craft worlds where there were no gardens before, tilling and cultivating stories and memories. I want us to push the boundaries of what we think of, when we think of community. I want us to loudly dismantle the idea that what holds us back is on the page and not inside of us. There is so much beyond—so, so, so, much beyond ourselves and beyond us writing poems. If we stepped down from our finite pedestals, those wobbly thrones, we might discover that there is much to garden, much to grow, much to bloom, when we intentionally build community.